{ 2008 03 31 }

Commentary: Stop fiddling with…just stop. Please. Stop.

TFS sufferers are advised not to continue.

The Xinhua commentary is propaganda at its most stimulating. A wild, unruly beast of a thing, it has the power to make you cringe, chortle and cry out in disbelieving indignation all in the time it takes to read two sentences.

About a year ago, there was a concerted effort by Xinhua’s English-language news factory to up its production of commentaries. I’m almost certain the motivation behind the move was not to sate its subscribers’ thirst for an opinion fest. Rather, it was seen as a good way to put across China’s point of view ie tell the depraved western media to put a sock in it.

The immigrant polishing community at the time suggested, diplomatically of course, that it was not a good idea. Big Reason number one: a news agency does not publish commentaries. Big Reason number two was slightly more complicated due to Xinhua’s primary role as the Ministry of Publicity’s muck spreader. Any commentary released by Xinhua must surely convey an official opinion from on high. But this wasn’t always the case.

Sometimes Xinhua was told to release a commentary written by the State Council eg a character assessment of the Dalai Lama. The journalist’s task was to translate it word for word. The polisher’s task, well at least how he saw it, was to sign his name on the copy without making any changes (apart from glaring grammatical errors, which if left uncorrected would have constituted a gross betrayal of the English language).

On other occasions, the senior editors would decide on a topic and a writer would be asked to construct a comment piece, which corresponded more or less with the government line on the issue. And this is where it all became a bit ridiculous. The journalist was effectively writing an opinion piece. He or she didn’t always share the government’s opinion but wasn’t allowed to write his or her own opinion. More often, the journalist didn’t have an opinion, which was reflected in the opinionless opinion piece. The polisher then had to do an entire rewrite, chucking in liberal clumps of his own opinion. Of course, there was no point in contradicting central government policy. It probably wouldn’t have sneaked through the political content screening but even if it had, the article would hardly have been reflective of a governmental change of heart. But I do remember one polishing comrade writing his own suggestions for how the one-child policy could be better implemented. Maybe the family planning office read it and took note. Or maybe the article was only read by a couple of perplexed foreign news agency journalists given the glorious task of Xinhua wire-watching.

Luckily, the commentary craze never really caught on, probably because they were always rejected by the polishers and writing one became more hassle than it was worth. But as soon as the Ministry of Publicity decided how to respond to the Tibet ruckus, it was as if someone had set off the whole of Liuyang’s annual explosives output next to the Three Gorges Dam. Now, every day without fail, Xinhua releases a commentary.

The Dalai Lama critiques are of course highly entertaining for the readers, who marvel at how little has changed since the Cultural Revolution. For the journalist writing/translating, it must be a bizarre experience being told to shut down the part of the brain that houses rational thinking and then sign your name to the article. I once asked a colleague how he felt about putting his name to a State Council rant about the Dalai Lama. “I know I’m brainwashed but I still believe 80 percent of it,” was the reply.

As for the current commentaries, I’m not sure whether they are coming from the State Council for direct translation by the Xinhua journalists or if the journalists are being told to write them themselves, at the direction of the Ministry of Publicity. Wherever they originate, I’m finding it disconcerting to see familiar names occupying the byline slots, particularly as the majority of those names belong to the best writers in the department, and with whom conversations are always highly enjoyable, stimulating and informative.

These commentaries have a distinct unpleasantness about them, possessing characteristics that are certainly not relefective of the authors’ personalities. They are snide and bitterly sarcastic, right down to the use of quotation marks around phrases like “simple monk”. Often, they are just plain ugly, descending into acerbic name calling, which is of course why they only succeed in turning their audience against the Chinese government. There also seems to be a policy of tossing in as much first-person content as possible, presumably to emphasise that the author is writing from the heart rather than on order of the propaganda masters. Take this odd concluding paragraph to this commentary:

I have no power to make this “simple monk” truly as simple as a monk. I only know that I have heard sweet words one day and seen them contradicted the next.

Sounds like something from the Bible.

When it comes to Tibet, there are two main targets for the commentaries’ ire: the Dalai Lama and his “clique” and the West (usually media). The victims both have an ambiguity about them. The Dalai Lama’s “clique” has never really been defined and the West is a concept. But last Friday, a Xinhua commentary chose to attack a group of young and very scared monks who had dared to speak out against the authorities in front of foreign media cameras - they believed they would be arrested for their actions but felt their words were worth the risk. And that’s when I felt the propaganda assault plumbed new depths of unpleasantness.

BEIJING, March 28 (Xinhua) — The images of the saffron-robed monks in Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple complaining about rights and freedom and demanding the return of the Dalai Lama certainly grabbed the attention of the world’s media.

It was a very effective intervention by the monks. Yet, what do they know about Tibet’s feudal past, which ended only in 1959?

After all, most of them are young men around 20 and know their spiritual leader only by his name.

The 14th Dalai Lama, like all his predecessors, was the biggest serf-owner. He owned every inch of land and every head of cattle in Tibet and was free to exploit — even sell off — his serfs and slaves.

Had the protesting young monks known this, they would probably know better than to fiddle with human rights now.

Having told the monks they had no right to think whatever they were thinking - or “fiddle” with their own human rights - because they were ignorant it then highlighted their ungratefulness:

They complained of having no religious rights, but the central government has allocated more than 700 million yuan (97 million U.S. dollars) since 1980 to maintain 1,400 monasteries and cultural relics.

That’s a hefty amount even for the world’s fourth largest economy.

Tibet now has more than 1,700 religious sites for Tibetan Buddhism that accommodate 460,000 monks and nuns, four mosques with 3,000 muslims, and a Tibetan Catholic Church for 700 believers.

Latest figures say 100 percent of farmers and herders, who account for more than 80 percent of the Tibetan population, get free medical care.

Remember the migrant would-be father who refused to sign off a Beijing hospital’s request for a Caesarean section last year, and lost his wife and baby? It was all because he had no money!

(Incidentally, I have to confess I’m having difficulty remembering the migrant would-be father story. I blame the cloudiness on the fact that Xinhua’s English-language department refused to release this particular story at the time because “it was just one individual case, the type that happens all the time in China, and the foreign media would only use it to make China look bad again.” The Chinese media covered it widely and it developed into one of the big talking points of the year.)

This commentary sums up perfectly the reasons why it will be a long, long time before the Chinese government gets the Tibetans on board. There is no attempt at understanding anything about what Tibetans are thinking. The argument is based purely on money and statistics. The door to discussions is closed. Funny really, because the Xinhua bosses could feed a similar argument to many of their journalists…

“What do you mean, you hate your job? Just count yourself lucky you didn’t have to whip up public insanity during the Cultural Revolution! You weren’t even born then! We’ve just allocated millions of yuan on a fancy new dining hall to make your TWO-HOUR lunch breaks more palatable. You get free healthcare and if you write lots of meaningless four-par stories you can easily meet your quota! What could you possibly dislike about working here?”

It’s time to admit the commentary made a good point though, which I believe Roland on ESWN mentioned in his entertaining conspiracy theory post:

When they cried out “it’s all lies”, I really wondered who was lying?

The monks, who claimed to be eyewitnesses to the alleged “killing of more than 100 Tibetans and arrests of more than 1,000″,also complained of having been confined at the temple from March 10 to March 26, while the riots took place on and after March 14..

None of the foreign reporters on the scene seemed to have noticed the contradiction — that if confined they couldn’t have witnessed what they claimed he had.

What about asking the authorities to clear this up? Are the young monks being imprisoned in their own monastery? Or are they allowed a modicum of “religious freedom” which would allow them to stumble across dead bodies?

Looks like I’ve developed the sarcastic quotation mark thing …

Posted by Chris O'Brien on Monday, March 31st, 2008, at 1:55 pm, and filed under Tibet.

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